Network service providers often receive data from or send data to a network, which may be a public switched telephone network (PSTN), a wireless network, the Internet, etc., in order to communicate operational support system (OSS) data. For example, data collection devices or computers of the network service provider's local network may desire to send and/or receive OSS data via a switch or some other network element of the network. The OSS data may relate, for example, to maintenance operations for equipment on the network that is associated with the network service provider or to billing record data such as Automatic Message Accounting (AMA) data. In a typical situation, the service provider may perform the maintenance operations though discrete operations conducted via dial up connections that provide relatively low speed data transfer rates. Meanwhile, billing record data such as AMA data may be very voluminous such that long or near continuous downloading of such information may be performed, thereby making any downtime relatively difficult to recover from.
In an effort to reduce the above difficulties, some solutions have been developed to increase data transfer rates for certain types of OSS data by providing higher speed modems. However, such solutions may be highly proprietary and inflexible.